Jeremy Sammut writes at CIS:

Banning Muslim immigration — as TV personality Sonia Kruger has urged — would cause more problems than it would solve. It would, at a minimum, violate the first rule of a successful non-discriminatory immigration program, which is that you cannot invite people into a country, insult them, and not expect to compromise social cohesion.

I agree. Treating all 1.4 billion Muslims as identical in views and beliefs is as silly as thinking the Pope and Brian Tamaki have the same views and beliefs.

That said, Kruger does not deserve the abuse that has been doled out for thinking aloud about Islamist terrorism and throwing up the idea of a religion-based migration bar.

The idea that Kruger is a racist is absurd. What is more telling is that someone who is far from being a culture warrior dared to cross a cultural fault line and express such an un-PC opinion.

Kruger is a modern woman who, like most of us, takes the norms of western democratic societies for granted. Like most of us, as well, she finds it unfathomable that religious belief would motivate the kind of horrific acts of political violence that are proliferating in number and scale in countries with large Muslim populations.

Unlike her critics, at least Kruger is honest, and takes the religious origins of terrorism seriously — and doesn’t buy the myth that atrocities like Paris and Nice are ‘nothing to do with religion’.

Kruger’s solution was wrong, but you should be able to debate the issue.

So far this year there have been 1,309 Islamic attacks, which is about seven a day. And more and more of these are happening in “Western” countries, so it is no surprise that people are scared and want to debate how to make their communities safer.

There have, of course, been predictable claims made about hatred and ‘Islamophobia’ … lead by local Islamic leaders and organisations.

Once again, the Islamic community has failed to adopt a more constructive approach. Instead of denying that terrorism has anything to do with Islam, they should accept that the kind of concerns Kruger articulated about religiously-motivated terrorism are entirely legitimate.

Many Australians simply do not understand why the Islamic community cannot come out strongly and state plainly that they share their fellow citizens’ concerns about what a minority of their co-religionists do in the name of their religion.

If they did this, they would practise what I think is the second rule of a successful non-discriminatory immigration program: fears about social cohesion are best addressed not by migrant groups playing the perpetual victim, but by demonstrating that these groups fully share and believe in mainstream Australian values.

Well said.

John Palino announced:

Auckland mayoral candidate John Palino today promised to restore local government in Auckland by restoring rating powers to local authorities.

The New Zealand Initiative’s latest report ‘The Local Benchmark – When Smaller is Better’, has confirmed what just about everybody in Auckland has been thinking: centralising local decisions in the hands of a large and unaccountable bureaucracy does not lead to better outcomes.

The promised gains from the Supercity, including lower rates, better decisions and a better Auckland have failed to materialise. Rates have increased massively, congestion has become worse, housing has got more expensive and local opinions have been silenced by an obstinate, overbearing centralised council.  

We’ve had six years and the results are now tragically clear. The Auckland Council is process-driven, inflexible and unresponsive to what distinct communities really value. A bloated and complex bureaucracy has failed to engage on local issues and every objection, reasonable or not, has been labelled NIMBYism in an effort to enforce regional conformity.

The New Zealand Initiative’s report outlines some of the opportunities and benefits of having decisions made at local level, rather than by a central body. There are some valuable lessons from other parts of the world, including the failed amalgamation in Montreal. “Perhaps the most surprising part of this paper is the way that smaller local government sizes provide lower costs and more efficient governance than the bigger amalgamated councils. Auckland is not alone in failing to deliver its citizens a dividend from amalgamation.

Auckland would be better governed if it were treated as a region rather than a single Super City. Only those matters which are relevant to the region as a whole should be dealt with by the Auckland Council: a high level growth management plan built off local plans; regional arterials and public transport; and water services.

I agree that local decisions should be made locally. The Auckland Council should only be deciding on things the affect the whole Region.

ACT point out:

Green Times
According to her Green Party bio, Green MP Marama Davidson is ‘an online activist.’ She is now travelling to the Middle East to protest the blockade of the Gaza strip. We can only assume she has paid her own way including carbon credits, and she will be speaking out against the homophobia and misogyny in Gaza as well as the Israeli blockade.

Good to know everything is so good here that the big focus is Israel trying to stop suicide bombers.

Hamas, who control Gaza, are real friends of the people. Their record includes:

• seizing union property
• killing the union deputy general secretary
• torturing people for being gay
• banned girls from riding on motor scooters with men
• banned women from doing marathons
• banned a book of Palestinian folk-tales
• beaten people for wearing hair gel

Will Marama Davidson be protesting against any of that?

The Herald reports:

More urban sprawl and greater intensification have been recommended in a new rulebook for Auckland released today.

The city’s urban boundary will be expanded to free up 30 per cent more land for housing and many homeowners, particularly in the central isthmus, will find their homes rezoned for intensification.

These are among the big changes recommended by an independent hearings panel, for the new rulebook, formally known as the Unitary Plan.

Auckland council’s new rulebook telling people what can be built,where and what height buildings can go has been three years in the making.

The panel has come up with a proposal to provide 422,000 new dwellings over the next 30 years, 270,000 within the existing urban boundary and 152,000 in rural areas and around towns like Warkworth, Pukekohe and Kumeu.

This is a good step or even two steps in the right direction but the ratio between up and out should be around 50:50 not 2:1.

It is good they have recommended moving the boundary to free up 30% more land but as Phil Twyford has pointed out just moving the boundary encourages speculation and land banking to shift to the new boundary.  Only scrapping the boundary will lead to land prices stabilising.

The intensification proposals look good to me, and I hope they get approved. It isn’t a choice of up or out – we need both.

Stuff reports:

The at-times controversial National MP Maurice Williamson has announced his retirement from politics at next year’s election. …

Williamson thanked his electorate, who had “so generously supported” him for the past 30 years. 

“Their tremendous support has never been taken for granted and I have always known that I needed to earn each and every vote.

“I particularly appreciated their continued loyal support after the introduction of MMP in 1996, which enabled voters to support a political party but not necessarily that party’s candidate.”

He said it was a “privilege to be the MP for Pakuranga”, and to be a Minister for 15 of those years.

Maurice had and has huge support in Pakuranga. He got almost three times as many votes as the Labour candidate in 2014.

It is good to see National continuing to renew itself in Government. There will be new National candidates next year in East Coast Bays, Waikato and Pakuranga. I expect at least two more retirements to come also.

The Herald reports:

A priest has been beheaded and a nun is “fighting for her life” after two knife-wielding Islamic State terrorists took worshippers hostage at a church in northern France.

The attackers were shot and killed after raiding a morning Mass at 9am Tuesday (7pm Tuesday NZT) in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in Normandy.

A third suspect – pictured wearing a white T-shirt and blue tracksuit pants – has been arrested.

Father Jacques Hamel, 84, was slaughtered by the assailants.

A nun who was in the church during the attack said he was forced to the ground before his throat was slit.

The slaughter of innocents is almost becoming a daily occurrence.

Stuff reports:

Labour would welcome the chance to negotiate a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact if it did not get United States approval this year, leader Andrew Little said on Tuesday.

In a major speech on international affairs in Wellington, Little underscored Labour’s continuing “engagement” and his rejection of “isolationism”, despite the party’s opposition to the TPP in its current form, saying it was proudly a free trade party.

It used to be. Actions count more than words and Labour has turned its back on 25 years of bipartisan support for trade agreements.

He said the 12 country trade agreement, which includes Japan and the US, offered a weak deal on dairy.

But he said the question could become moot. If the US does not ratify it, it would die – and both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton were opposed to the TPP.

“It’s getting too late for President Obama to try to pass it before he leaves office. Congress already defeated him once on trade this year, and something big needs to change before he’ll risk being defeated again,” Little said.

“If TPP doesn’t progress this year, Labour would welcome the chance to be part of resumed negotiations leading to an agreement that does away with more tariffs, without curtailing the ability of countries to make laws in their own interests.”

Little is in fairy land. Trump and Clinton are against TPP because they say countries like NZ and Australia got too good a deal at the expense of the US. Their constituencies don’t want any tariff reductions at all.

If TPP does not pass in the lame duck session of Congress, it is dead as a door knob. It won’t be renegotiated.

The Herald reports:

A decision by Labour’s Hutt South MP Trevor Mallard to stand on the list only next election makes it more likely the seat will fall to National.

Mallard has had a strong personal following in the seat, having held it since 1993.

But in the 2014 election, National’s young candidate Chris Bishop reduced Mallard’s majority to just 709, from 4825 in 2011.

Mallard would also have picked up votes from local Green candidate and list MP at the time Holly Walker, who was retiring from politics.

The greater indication of where the seat could head in next year’s election in in the party vote: National overwhelmingly won the party vote with 17,648, well ahead of Labour on 10,903.

Even with the Greens added to Labour, National was ahead on the party vote by more than 2000.

Generally there are only two reasons an Electorate MP goes list only:

1. They are a senior Minister and don’t have the time to carry on being an effective Electorate MP (Michael Cullen, Bill English)
2. They think they are going to lose the seat (or the nomination) and want someone else to wear the loss

It will be quite extraordinary if National picks up electorate seats in 2017, going for their 4th term. Normally governing parties lose electorate seats at their 4th election. The history is:

• 1946 Labour lost three seats
• 1957 National lost six seats
• 1969 National lost one seat
• 1984 National lost 10 seats
• 1999 National lost five seats (lost seven electorate, gained two list)
• 2008 Labour lost six seats (lost ten electorate, gained four list)

So National potentially winning new electorate seats in 2017 is a big thing – it goes against all post WWII history.

A reader writes in:

I don’t know if you bother reading some of the other blog comments but there is strange goings on at FrogBlog  I go there  to post occasionally.

About a week or go, Gareth made another post on domestic solar energy. https://blog.greens.org.nz/2016/07/13/kiwis-and-solar-energy-record-numbers/   A fact check showed that he had left a word out of a quote that changed its meaning. One  their staffers recognised this in the comments and corrected the quote but without putting in an update postscript on the main post. Gareth never acknowledged his mistake but that is par for the course. 

Then several days later Ms Davidson put in a post https://blog.greens.org.nz/2016/07/19/racist-place-names-have-to-go-an-open-letter-to-the-minister/  The first responder with a name like Kiwi@NZ   rubbished her post with statements like it was bit of NZ history – this is NZ not Aotearoa blah blah blah. More stupid than aggressive or abusive.  I didn’t note any personal attack in his rant but then maybe I’m a bit thicker skinned. After a day, the comment was deleted. Other regular commenters noted this and started piling it on – nothing really bad, just pointing out the censorship. All those posts were then deleted.

Then this post came out  https://blog.greens.org.nz/2016/07/21/a-change-to-our-blog-switching-off-comments/      saying they weren’t going to have comments any more because people didn’t play fair.

Looks like a free and fair society is being redefined.

So the Labour Party blog has closed down and the Green blog no longer allows dissent. Sad.

A most bizarre article published by Massey University. It is by senior lecturer in management Dr Damian Ruth:

The Productivity Commission is two months away from delivering its draft report on the future of higher education in New Zealand. Its inquiry into new models of tertiary education aims to find ways of achieving better economic outcomes from New Zealand’s investment in the sector. This should be put into the context of ambitions to turn the ‘education industry’ into a million-dollar enterprise – but there is also a larger context.

Environmentalist David Orr says education systems are how we shape future generations to think about the world. Sadly, education per se is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. As Orr points out, the destruction of the natural world to date has not been the work of ignorant people. It has been, largely, the result of the work of educated people. What kind of education do we need?

There are dots to be joined here. Donald Trump in the United States, xenophobia in Europe, the brutality of detention centres in Australia – these are the end result of an authoritarianism that will not tolerate dissent. We see the same thing in corporate malfeasance and government corruption. And now we can see it shaping education.

Meaningful education entails critique, reflexivity and conversation; when education is cast in terms of the management of provision and performance, it is rendered meaningless. As our education becomes more managed, more ‘effective’ in economic terms, it offers less and less of a barrier to barbarity. Today my students want to be efficient consumers and they want me to be an efficient courier. Under the pressure of productivity, education is turned into making sure the vending machine always works.

Up until this point it is the pretty standard rant against tertiary education management. But then he goes on and jumps the shark:

In her famous book about Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, political philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘banality of evil’ to describe the tendency of people to obey orders without critical evaluation. She pointed out that Eichmann did not want to think about the nature of his work – he just wanted to get on with the job and his job was organising transport. And as we know, he was very efficient. We know, because the forms were properly filled and the process was well-audited. Job done.

Education is a constant struggle against the banality of evil. To educate is to insist on thinking. It cultivates the capacity to contest. While it seems unthinkable that horrors such as the holocaust could ever take root here in New Zealand, it was also unthinkable in Germany in the 1930s. If we are going to fashion higher education policy here today along the fault lines identified by Wiesel in Germany preceding World War II, then perhaps it is not as unthinkable as we think.

So our tertiary education system is “evil” and may lead to New Zealand turning into Nazi Germany.

I despair that this is the level of argument a senior academic resorts to. It is also deeply deeply insulting to those who were affected by the Holocaust.

The ARA announced:

Today we launched our 2016 Ratepayer Protection Pledge, to identify those candidates standing for Auckland Council who are aligned to the Ratepayers’ Alliance vision of reasonable rates and sensible spending by the Super City.

The pledge reads:

“I [candidate’s name] pledge to all Aucklanders that I will not vote for any measures which increase the total average burden of rates, levies, and other compulsory Council charges, more than 2% per annum.”We’re asking all Auckland Council candidates – no matter their political persuasion – to champion fiscal prudence and sign the pledge.

This gives Aucklanders a choice. If you don’t want to keep receiving rates increases of 10%, then do not vote for any candidate who won’t sign this pledge.

There will be advertisements in Auckland showing who has and has not signed the pledge, to help people decide who to vote for Mayor, and for Council.

Cato report:

The transition from socialism to the market economy produced a divide between those who advocated rapid, or “big-bang” reforms, and those who advocated a gradual approach. More than 25 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, providing ample empirical data to test those approaches. Evidence shows that early and rapid reformers by far outperformed gradual reformers, both on economic measures such as GDP per capita and on social indicators such as the United Nations Human Development Index.

I am not surprised.

A key argument for gradualism was that too-rapid reforms would cause great social pain. In reality, rapid reformers experienced shorter recessions and recovered much earlier than gradual reformers. Indeed a much broader measure of well-being, the Human Development Index, points to the same conclusion: the social costs of transition in rapidly reforming countries were lower.

NZ would be far worse off if we had not had the rapid reforms from 1984 to 1993.

Piers Morgan looks at how Trump can win the presidency. His ten points are:

1. “Crooked Hillary” meme
2. His family – aesthetically pleasing, articulate charmers
3. The TV debates – Trump is a TV superstar and natural showman who loves working the camera and audiences
4. The Rust Belt – win over Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin
5. VP Pick of Mike Pence – locks in conservative voters
6. His gut – follows guts instinct not focus groups
7. Social media – Has 10.1 million followers on Twitter
8. Get organised – needs a top back room team
9. Charm – show his softer side
10. “Crooked Hillary” – when in doubt use this again

The polls show Trump got a boost from the convention but Clinton still ahead on average. The state polls will be the real ones to watch out for.

Bryce Wilkinson writes at the NZ Initiative:

Last week everyone in The New Zealand Initiative was amazed to read in the Otago Daily Times, recycled in The New Zealand Herald, that in effect we advocate the decimation of New Zealand’s welfare state.

This ludicrous assertion was attributed to a Brian Roper at the University of Otago. Here is the full quote:

”If you look at the New Zealand Initiative, which is the successor to the Business Roundtable, they want government expenditure reduced to 20% of GDP or lower, which would be the lowest level percentage in the OECD. That could only be achieved through the decimation of New Zealand’s welfare state.
”There is no end-point to their demands.”

This was news to me also. I’ve followed the Initiative since they were established and have never known them to demand government expenditure by reduced to 20% of GDP.

Naturally we contacted this sage for clarification. It turned out that he could offer no New Zealand Initiative statement whatsoever to support his assertion.

None. Zero. Zilch. It would be hard to conceive an emptier assertion.

The pathetic best he could do was to claim that anything that the New Zealand Business Roundtable had ever written and we had not explicitly disowned must represent our position!

Well we have some news for him. It doesn’t. The same applies to statements made by The New Zealand Institute. (These two organisations merged to form The New Zealand Initiative and they did not have the same views.)

So Roper is using something written by a previous organisation 20 years ago, to support his assertion.

Perhaps we should add at this point that Brian Roper happens to be an associate professor in the political science department. According to this piece of staff information on the University’s website he “has been a political activist for more than twenty years, and has been involved in a wide variety of progressive struggles and campaigns”. Apart from politics his listed research interests include; social inequality; gender and feminism and Marxism.

OK, doubtless many readers will be thinking “Say no more. What else could you expect from a Marxist ideologue? Move on.”

That reminds me of the research in the US which found eight times as many Marxist professors as Republican ones!

MBIE have said:

Being tired on the job is a health and safety issue many businesses have to grapple with, says a world authority on worker fatigue.

“Fatigue is just another hazard,” says Professor Drew Dawson, director of the Appleton Institute at the Central Queensland University.

“Businesses need to be aware that the effects of fatigue on performance are similar to the effects of alcohol. It’s not reasonable to be in the workplace under the influence of alcohol or under the influence of fatigue.”

Managing fatigue is also about making sure staff have had sufficient sleep to work safely, says Prof Dawson.

But an employer can only do so much. Sure don’t have staff work 16 hours in a row, but what if they are fatigued and only working eight hours?

“Most people confuse fatigue management with their employment agreement and assume that if you comply with the rules of rostering, then it will be safe.

“It doesn’t take much thinking to realise this is not always true. For instance, if you’re up all night with a sick child, you will be unfit for work, irrespective of how long your shift is.”

This is true, but what does an employer do? Send a parent home because they were up all night? Is that the employer’s decision or the employee’s?

For the first time ever an electoral college projection has Trump in the lead, and it is Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver.

This will be major news. And just as the Democratic convention starts. Every time Clinton’s name is mentioned, the is huge booing. It has got so bad Bernie Sanders has had to text all the delegates asking them to stop booing speakers when they mention Clinton’s name.

The projection has Trump 281 and Clinton 257. Trump is now rated 56% likely to win.

They now have Trump ahead in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Georgia.

Peter Diamandis writes:

But what people aren’t talking about, and what’s getting my attention, is a forthcoming rapid demonetizationof the cost of living.

Meaning — it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to meet our basic needs.

Powered by developments in exponential technologies, the cost of housing, transportation, food, health care, entertainment, clothing, education and so on will fall, eventually approaching, believe it or not, zero.

In this blog, I’ll explore how people spend their money now and how “technological socialism” (i.e., having our lives taken care of by technology) can demonetize living.

As an entrepreneur, CEO or leader, understanding this trend and its implications is important…it will change the way we live, work, and play in the years ahead.

Sounds far fetched but …

To me, “demonetization” means the ability of technology to take a product or service that was previously expensive and make it substantially cheaper or potentially free (in the extreme boundary condition). It means removing money from the equation.

Consider Photography: In the Kodak years, photography was expensive. You paid for the camera, for the film, for developing the film, and so on. Today, during the megapixel era, the camera in your phone is free — no film, no developing. Completely demonetized.

Consider Information/Research: In years past, collecting obscure data was hard, expensive in time if you did it yourself, or expensive in money if you hired researchers. Today, during the Google era, it’s free and the quality is 1000x better. Access to information, data, and research is fully demonetized.

Consider live video or phone calls: Demonetized by Skype, Google Hangouts, the list goes on:

• Craigslist demonetized classifieds

• iTunes demonetized the music industry

• Uber demonetized transportation

• Airbnb demonetized hotels

• Amazon demonetized bookstores

All good examples. Who spends on classified ads now? Photography only now costs time for most people. Calls to friends overseas are free and used to cost hundreds of dollars.

The automotive market (a trillion dollars) is being demonetized by startups like Uber. But this is just the beginning.

When Uber rolls out fully autonomous services, your cost of transportation will plummet.

Think about all of the related costs that disappear: auto insurance, auto repairs, parking, fuel, parking tickets. Your overall cost of “getting around” will be 5 to 10 times cheaper when compared to owning a car.

This is the future of “car as a service.”

Possibly the most exciting aspect.

Rob Hosking writes in NBR:

National’s support jumped 10% in the Roy Morgan poll, which closed in the final week of the school holidays, and there was a small explosion among political junkies over the weekend as a result.

It is wise to be dubious about any political poll which jumps 10% in any direction in the space of one month.

And, of course, the Roy Morgan poll, when it comes to volatility, makes the New Zealand exchange rate look about as stable as a steam roller.

Heh.

The jump puts National at 53% support – and that is what has caused a lot of fizzing from activists.

The presumption had been that if there would be any movement, it would be against the government, mostly due to rising concerns, and certainly a lot of publicity,  about house prices and home affordability. …

But what it does show is that despite what has been a pretty embattled couple of months for the government, its support is holding up.

Disquiet ≠ vote change
Anecdotally, there is a lot of disquiet with the government even – or over some issues, especially – among the National Party’s support base.

But that disquiet is not translating into a shift in votes. Most people are capable of holding more than one idea in their heads at the same time, even if all too many political activists do not give people credit for being able to do this.

Absolutely. There are many areas I disagree with the Government and think they could and should do better. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to shift my vote.

The most important thing pointing to any change in the political mood tends to be not so much questions about individual political parties but a broad question about whether the country is heading in the right or wrong direction.

This is up slightly from 54% to 57% saying the country is heading in the right direction. While not reaching the regular 62-67% heights of either 2009 – 10 or 2014, the numbers opting for “right direction” have, since the 2014 general election, been running on average above what they were in three years from the end of 2010 to the end of 2013.

Rob Hosking is correct that the right vs wrong direction indicator is crucial.

Stuff reports:

The Government wants to make New Zealand predator-free by 2050, formally adopting a target to eradicate all pests that threaten New Zealand’s native birds. 

Prime Minister John Key announced the goal, alongside Conservation Minister Maggie Barry, as well as a $28 million funding injection into a joint venture company to kickstart the campaign. 

“Rats, possums and stoats kill 25 million of our native birds every year, and prey on other native species such as lizards and, along with the rest of our environment, we must do more to protect them,” Key said. …

By 2025, the Government has set four interim goals, which include:

• Having 1 million hectares of land where pests are suppressed or removed; 
• The development of a scientific breakthrough, capable of removing entirely one small mammalian predator;
• To be able demonstrate that areas of 20,000 hectares can be predator free without the use of fences like the one at at Wellington’s Zealandia sanctuary; 
• And the complete removal of all introduced predators from offshore island nature reserves. 

Introduced pests threatened the economy and primary sector, their total economic cost is estimated at about $3.3 billion a year, Key said.

“This is the most ambitious conservation project attempted anywhere in the world, but we believe if we all work together as a country we can achieve it.”

The Government has set up a new Crown Entity – Predator Free New Zealand Limited – to drive the programme alongside the private sector. 

That was on top of $60m to $80m already invested in pest control each year. 

This is a great initiative. I became aware of the proposal around two or three years ago and my first reaction was that you can’t achieve it – it only take one pregnant rat or stoat to reinfect an area. But if you go about it in a systematic way over two or three decades, it can be achieved. The cost is not insignificant – $10 billion or so. But over 20+ years that is a very good investment to make NZ predator-free.

Being lucky enough to live near Zealandia, I already see and enjoy the benefits of having some small areas safe for native birds. Extending this to all of New Zealand will really transform our country. Of course there will still be other predators (including humans) but rats, stoats, possums and ferrets kill 25 million birds a year and massively outweigh all other threats.

Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce said New Zealand would prove itself a world leader in conservation science and technology. 

“For the first time, technology is starting to make feasible what previously seemed like an unattainable dream.

“I think what’s really exciting is for those of us watching this closely, is that the technology has moved dramatically,” Joyce said.

“You used to have to put out a trap line across an area of land and send people back every time the traps were sprung.

“Now you can set them and leave them, link them through GPS, it’s about one seventeenth of the cost to maintain predator control over a piece of land, than it was just a few years ago.”

Barry said target was considered unachievable until recently. 

The potential for scientific break-through’s were what made the target achievable. 

Yep it has become achievable.

Green Party conservation spokesman Kevin Hague said welcomed the target, but said research showed it would cost $9b to make New Zealand predator-free. 

“The Government seems happy to once again put out the begging bowl to the private sector to fund what should be taken care of by the Government.

Hague seems to think it is wrong to seek private sector support. Far from wrong, it is preferable to do so. Many companies would love the opportunity to invest in this initiative, which helps their brand.

“The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.”

– Grover Norquist

The quote of the week is brought to you by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. To support the Union’s campaign for lower taxes and less government waste, click here.

As bad as Venezuela is now, it looks like it will get worse.

The latest IMF projections are:

• Economy will shrink 26.1% over six years
• Inflation will hit 3500%
• Unemployment will exceed 26%

That level of economic shrinkage is unprecedented – only the Great Depression was worse.